Combat Camera (29 page)

It was raining as we landed. The good old rain, the life-giving rain. It slanted across my window as I looked out over the fields of Oxfordshire. I hadn’t seen it fall for more than four months.

The pilot parked us right outside the terminal. We all got off, exposing our sun-darkened faces to the rain as we stepped down onto the tarmac. As with our departure from Bastion, there was very little talking.

We walked into the terminal – a grey, squat building – and waited for our baggage. It came round on a carousel after five minutes. Our weapons came in separately. Each of us took a luggage trolley and made our way through to the lobby.

I saw one tearful reunion, a blonde wrapping herself around a stunned airman, but otherwise the lobby was empty. For some reason, I’d been expecting a mass outpouring of emotion, families throwing themselves at us as we appeared in the doorway, but that didn’t happen. It seemed that most of us, like myself, had a little bit farther to go.

Faulkner came over. His lift was outside, and it was time to say goodbye.

“Take care, Christian. Good working with you.”

“And you too, sir.”

We smiled and shook hands, and that was that. He was gone. Whether he really thought it was good working with me, I had no idea. Possibly he thought I was one of the arsewipes, but didn’t want to say.

My own transport turned up ten minutes later. It was the dreaded white minibus from Chilwell. Mercifully, the prostitute-loving corporal was nowhere to be seen. A sensible-looking civilian with grey hair was behind the wheel instead.

It took two hours to get back to Chilwell – the normal journey time. The sensible civilian dropped me off outside the armoury. I’d rung my father on the way back, giving him a pick-up time. He still hadn’t arrived when we got there, so I had time to give my rifle and pistol a quick wipe-down before signing them back into the armoury.

When I stepped outside the armoury again, my father was just getting out of his car. He’d come straight from his weekly game of tennis, still wearing his shorts and a polo shirt. He smiled when he saw me, then broke into tears.

“Christian. Good to see you again.”

I gave him a hug. “Hello, Dad.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine, Dad. I’m absolutely fine.”

He drove home, telling me all his latest news: his tennis result (he won), a spat with the neighbours about a fence, Monty and Trudie’s latest antics. I was keen to hear all about it. We stayed off the subject of Afghanistan for most of the journey.

“How was it out there?” he asked eventually.

“It was fine,” I said. “Nothing bad happened.”

“Really?”

“Well, not that I saw.”

He nodded. “Good.”

We got home, pulling up on the gravel driveway. A “Welcome Home” banner hung over the front door. As I climbed out of the car, the door opened and the dogs ran out. I had been concerned that Monty would have a heart attack on seeing me – he was ten years old and showing it – but he was quite well behaved, as was Trudie (two years old, not a heart-attack risk). They both stopped in front of me and waited to be fussed over, tails wagging. I’d instructed my mother to show them home-video footage of me in the last few days so that my return wouldn’t come as such a shock. It seemed to be working.

I knelt down and petted them both, just as the rest of my family came out: my mother, brother and sister, along with my three-year-old nephew Laurie. He hurried over first, excited to see his uncle in an army uniform. I picked him up and ruffled his hair, then walked over to my mother.

“Hello, Mum.”

I had expected my mother to do some crying, but she was surprisingly composed. I began to think my father had somehow managed to shed all the tears on her behalf. She looked at me almost warily, as though she wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m fine, Mum.” I put Laurie down and gave her a hug. “I’m just fine.”

“Are you sure?”

At no stage had I told my parents I’d suffered in Afghanistan, but they were still clearly concerned that a traumatized monster might have returned in my place. My phone calls home had always been scant on working detail – the insecure lines meant that actual information had to be kept to a minimum – so their imaginations had filled in the gaps.

“I’m absolutely fine,” I said. “Trust me.”

My mother seemed happy with my answer, but I gave her another hug anyway. It was a day for hugging. My sister and brother were next – they got the treatment – then my mother suggested we all go into the house.

“We’ve got bubbly in the fridge,” she said, tears filling her eyes.

“We better drink it then.”

I followed them inside for champagne and sympathy, the former somewhat more deserved than the latter.

Epilogue

A year has passed since I returned from Afghanistan. I’m writing this at home in Nottinghamshire, the rain hammering against the loft window. After two very dry winters, we’ve had one of the wettest summers since records began. A lot of the country has been suffering from drought, so no one is really complaining. Hard rain is much needed.

The war drifts in and out of the news, struggling to make the headlines. “Afghanistan fatigue” doesn’t just affect the troops: apparently it extends to the general public, tired of hearing about something so miserable, so far away. The appetite for tales of woe from the desert has been replaced by more domestic concerns, the Western media preferring to focus on crime, showbiz, the economy and the weather.

I haven’t seen Russ since I got back – we’re friends on Facebook, nothing more – but I saw Ali at an MOG training weekend back in November. She’d only been back a few weeks, her face still brown from the Afghan sun.

“How did the rest of it go?” I asked her.

“It was OK,” she said. “We had a bit of fun with the Rifles, but it was all good.”

I already knew about the Rifles operation. Joe had started pushing for places on the Afghan-led offensive in Nahr-e Saraj within days of his arrival. By all accounts the operation had gone well, although Joe and Ali had come under heavy fire while out on patrol.

“How was Joe?”

“Joe was good, although he changed after that contact.”

“In what way?”

“Much less gung-ho. We didn’t go out as much after that.”

We chatted for ten minutes, reminiscing about the JMOC, running through the various personalities. Eventually we got around to some of the reporters, including the big man himself.

“Ross Kemp came back out,” Ali said, “and the Taliban finally shot at him!”

I had to smile. “Thank God for that.”

“An RPG as well. So he was happy.”

I pictured Ross hurling himself into a ditch as the RPG streaked overhead. After all those weeks in the Green Zone, he’d finally got what he wanted. Not for him the second-hand war story. He had to be there, right on the receiving end.

I was very different. I didn’t want to be there, right on the receiving end. I wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere safer.

As a BBC journalist and a reservist in the Media Operations Group, my priorities are easily blurred, but at least in the JMOC I had access to lines of communication that were clear and uncompromising. I occupied a privileged position, being able to look upon the war as both a soldier and a reporter. To my mind, that brought with it an obligation – moral, if not professional – to say something about what I saw.

The field reports might be considered a lame alternative to actual war reporting, but that doesn’t bother me. As far as I’m concerned, they do the job. Whenever I was in the field, away from Ops Watch, I didn’t know what was going on, save for the dramas in our own little tactical area. We’d be sitting in a patrol base, and Op Minimize would be announced, and no one would know why.

With the field reports at least, you knew what was happening. Throughout my tour I made a note of them whenever I could, and I’ve reproduced some of them in this book. Taken individually, they’re just snapshots, offering nothing more than a glimpse into the routine miseries of war. Considered as a whole, however, they produce a more telling effect, their numbers growing all the time, their depth of field stretching into the distance. Like rows of headstones in a cemetery, their strength lies in their repetition – they do not lend themselves to desensitization, and they do not lose their power to shock.

Not that the Combat Camera Team was trying to shock anybody. Our name was always a misnomer. We weren’t there to film and photograph combat. We were there to film and photograph something resembling its exact opposite. We were there to record evidence of progress.

Prior to Afghanistan, Combat Camera Teams were known as Mobile News Teams, but that didn’t work. No fighting unit wanted to go out on the ground with a Mobile News Team – it sounded like a liability. A trio of media guys – uniform or no uniform – would just slow everybody down. Hence the name change, turning us into something more robust, something more self-sufficient; a team that could presumably handle itself in a combat environment and not get everybody else killed.

I didn’t get the chance to describe combat first-hand, and for that I’m grateful. I’ve read enough of the reports to know it’s not something I want inside my head. There’s already enough stuff jumbling around in there as it is.

My career in local radio continues at a slow, inexorable pace, only now with the occasional panic attack. For almost ten years I’ve read the news and not been remotely bothered about any
technical difficulties that might arise during the bulletin. At the BBC we read the news off a monitor using a system called Radioman, which occasionally crashes, forcing the reader to revert to a printed version of the bulletin. This has never derailed me in the past – why would it? – but now, when it happens, the attack kicks in. My pulse rate doubles in a matter of seconds: I can feel my face start to burn and, most disastrously, I start to gasp for air.

Naturally I can see the funny side – there is something inherently amusing about a newsreader having a panic attack during a bulletin – but it’s never comical at the time. When it’s actually happening, it feels like I’m having a heart attack.

It’s happened three times since I got back from Afghanistan. Mercifully, it’s always been the 6 a.m. bulletin, when perhaps Radioman is still half asleep, and when hardly anybody is listening. The first two times it happened near the end of the bulletin, and I managed to curtail the read without drawing too much attention to myself. The third time was much worse – it crashed on my first story. I practically stopped breathing, my attempts to read sounding like something out of a horror movie. Had any children been listening, it would’ve given them nightmares. After twenty seconds I couldn’t take it any more, clawing at the faders, killing my microphone. The presenter had to cut back in, mumbling something about “technical difficulties” before playing a song.

My colleagues were perfectly good about it – they asked if I was OK, and then nothing more was said – but it’s not something I can just ignore. I have no idea why it happens. I’m certainly not traumatized by my experiences in Afghanistan. As I always tell people, nothing bad happened to me out there.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s my mind’s way of telling me to leave again and do something else – although, frankly, I have no idea what that would be.

APPENDIX 1

Field Reports and Significant Acts

TWO QUIET DAYS ON THE AFGHAN FRONT
(25
TH
–26
TH JUNE 2011
)

Saturday 25th June 2011

Significant acts: N/A
.

Helmand, 5.50 a.m.

A foot patrol from L Company 42 Commando comes under small-arms and indirect fire from up to three insurgents in Nahr-e Saraj. The Marines positively identify the insurgents’ position and return fire with fifty mortar rounds. Two A-10s from the 74th US Expeditionary Fighter Squadron drop one GBU-38 500-lb bomb and one GBU-54 500-lb bomb. Two Apaches engage the insurgents with one AGM-114 (Hellfire) and five hundred and sixty 30-mm rounds, forcing them to withdraw. Later the patrol is re-engaged by between two and four insurgents with indirect fire. The two Apaches positively identify the insurgents inside a compound and engage them with one AGM-114 and five hundred and twenty 30-mm rounds, forcing them to break contact. The engagement results in two buildings destroyed, one building damaged, one wall damaged and two insurgents killed (unconfirmed). There are no friendly forces casualties
.

Herat, 7.30 a.m.

A vehicle patrol from 207th ANA Corps strikes an IED in Adraskan District, killing three Afghan soldiers
.

Ghazni, 8.05 a.m.

A US route clearance patrol strikes an IED in Wali Mohammed-E Shahid District. The explosion results in four US soldiers Cat A
.